Quite a lot has happened during time when I was away from this blog and I’ll probably talk about some of it in next few days, but I’d like to start with news from Google.

I wrote a badly written post when Google Talk was unveiled. What bothered me most was the fact that it didn’t communicate with anybody and was in fact another walled garden.

Well, they fixed it and Google Talk now actually talks to other jabber servers including ours.

There are some problems with presence notification, but it’s hard to say yet who’s fault it is and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was ours. Sad thing about jabber is that there are few if any open source server implementations that wouldn’t be just a notch above suck.

In short run this won’t change much. Most people will still be on competing services and it might be difficult to get them off. But as a newborn optimist I see a promise of an open, working IM, where you’re not tied to wishes and development of one company even when that company is mine. And that can only be good.